Monday, February 6, 2012

Zolia Bistro

Baton Rouge, LouisianaI hardly ever read The LSU Reveille because it's simply a terrible paper. But, I was glad that I found one on a table at Inga's the other day while waiting for my order. I stumbled across an article of Zolia Bistro located at the the II City Plaza in downtown Baton Rouge. It had great reviews and it's Italian, so I had to try it.

It looked really nice when I walked in. It's in a fairly new building, so that was expected. You walk in and you immediately think of "coffee shop" because of the register and cooler. But then you get seated and the setting completely changes into a restaurant type feel. The seating area looked really nice as far as I could tell, but sadly my friend and I got seated at the first two top they had. Maybe I'll decline that seating option the next time I go.

Zolia Bistro serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Their lunch menu is mainly comprised of paninis and wraps. I got the Toscano panini which was loaded with herb-grilled chicken breast, spicy capicola, gruyere, pickled red onions and a dijon aioli. You also get the choice of a side of either an orzo pasta, vegetable chips, sour cream potato salad or a bowl of fruit. I chose the orzo pasta. It looked really nice when I got it, but I didn't really like it because I'm a true hater towards olives. The pasta basically had everything I liked: basil, zucchini, tomatoes, feta and some salt pepper, I'm sure there were some other herbs as well. Too bad, all I could taste were the olives. I guess my palate is very sensitive towards them so it kind of ruined it. The panini on the other hand was really good. The bread was good, and my stance with onions is a complete 180 with my thoughts on olives. The pickled red onion gave it a little twist on flavor and it added some really good texture. You really can't go wrong with grilled chicken, capicola and melted gruyere. The lightly buttered panini pressed bread only left an additional high note for my meal. Sadly, I really couldn't taste the aioli. Maybe I did and didn't really pay enough attention to it.

For 9 dollars, it wasn't bad at all. Only half of the sandwich is in the picture. I began eating before I snapped a photo haha.